Zeina Hashem Beck: Two Poems, with photographs by Rola Khayyat
Weâve been cold in the summer /with fear at the back of our necks, /we lay with blankets over our heads /instead of sleeping half-naked /on balconies.
All posts filed under: Poems
Weekly poems, selected by the editors. Featuring new work as well as poems from our rich archives.
Rebecca Hoogs: “Autobiography of Silence”
This poem is one of the newest poems in my first full-length collection, Self-Storage, and was written in response to a series of photographs. The unifying theme for the photographs (all by different artists) was that they all included people being very, very quiet. I wrote a line for each photograph and compiled the poem that way. The first person voice came early on, though the title came only after revision and is cousin to other poems in the book that are self-portraits written as animals, architectural spaces, or concepts. I included this poem in the book because, even though it felt slightly different stylistically than some of its older colleagues, it fit with one of the themes of the book, which is silence. Iâm interested in what we say and donât say. What we say when weâre not saying what weâre thinking. What secrets weâre not spilling (careful: contents may be hot). What weâre trying to tie the stem of as if thatâs somehow sexy. The sore we canât leave alone. Of course, arenât all …
DAVID BIESPIEL To Plumly from Lummi Island
Stanley Plumly has been a mentor and friend of mine since 1988 when I took his Form and Theory class at the University of Maryland. Lummi Island is the most northeasterly of the San Juan archipelago. Located near Bellingham, Washington, it is served by a small ferry that makes the six minute crossing about once an hour. It is just two hours from Seattle, and one and a half hours from Vancouver, BC. The Lummi Nation are a tribe of the Coast Salish. The tribe primarily resides on and around the Lummi Indian Reservation. The Lummi were forcibly moved to reservation lands after the signing of the Point Elliott Treaty in 1855.
Emily Pulfer-Terino: “Quick River” and “What We Love Is Killing Us”
Sometimes it takes a long time for me to find a poem in the material Iâve drafted; âQuick Riverâ started several years before it found its course. It began as a series of imagesâlight, leaves, river waterâdraped over a cerebral argument about the problems of suffering and attachment. I was just out of college then, and my interests in Zen Buddhism informed much of my thinking but had not yet manifested as more than an intellectual activity. I was engaged with the whiff of philosophy and the music in my earliest draft but, as I couldnât locate meaning in it, I put the piece away. Several years later I returned to the draft and discovered that the poem is less an argument about clinging to experience than it is an elegy mourning a friendship altered by loss and distance. Working to guide the poem from its cool detachment and lyrical gestures to a complicated and uncertain place, I needed the speaker to be more than an observer; she had to become a participant. That her …
Troy Jollimore: “My GPS Speaks”
Sometimes I finish a poem and then spend weeks or months trying to find the right title, but âMy GPS Speaksâ was a case of finding the title first and then trying to write the poem that went with it. Once I had âpuppy loveâ and âradar loveâ I had a sense of how the poem would move, logically speakingâthat it would proceed by association and zip from one phrase or concept or image to another, something like a stone skipping across the surface of a lake, but not in a straight line. No straight lines seemed to be the rule. The crucial thing seemed to be to find pairs of phrases that had some kind of electricity between them. I had the âsiege enginesâ/âsearch enginesâ pair in my notebook from months before, and once the pairing of âtornado shelterâ and âtax shelterâ presented itself to me I knew I was onto something. The finished piece feels to me like a summary of cosmic wisdom presented by a lecturer who is slowly, or maybe not …
Rachel Kessler: “59 Goodbyes”
While the tang of resolution still hangs in the new year air… Poet Rachel Kessler shows us how to let go. She reports: “This poem was written during a Vis-Ă -Vis Society experiment. The Vis-Ă -Vis Society is a group of poet-scientists dedicated to the analysis of the everyday.” 59 Goodbyes Goodbye serious Goodbye writing overly serious poems Goodbye taking everything so seriously Goodbye making everything into a joke Goodbye shame Goodbye dog poop in the basement Goodbye talking shit while doing naught Goodbye plot Goodbye pee in the wrong place Goodbye credit card debt Goodbye hip-hurting shoes Goodbye cold feet Goodbye shed dog hair drifting Goodbye drinking wine too quickly Goodbye dehydration Goodbye hoarding thriftstore clothes Goodbye feeling sad about being fat Goodbye fitness fantasy Goodbye falling asleep while driving Goodbye too-tight pants Goodbye taking it personally Goodbye impulse control Goodbye confessionalism Goodbye yelling in the morning Goodbye Romney Goodbye worrying about silences Goodbye explaining Goodbye smiling reflexively Goodbye waking up at 2:00 a.m. Goodbye waking up at 4:00 a.m. Goodbye …
Sarah Rose Nordgren: “Letter from a New England Girl”
Shortly after I moved to Provincetown Mass. in the Fall of 2008, I became plagued by a series of horrible nightmares. I had been told that my apartment at the Fine Arts Work Center was known to be haunted, and though I initially dismissed the story as a piece of superstitious art colony lore, the idea would seep into my brain when I was again sitting upright in my bed, clutched by terror from a dream. The thematic connection between the dreams was violence: or more specifically, the self-directed brutality of women as a counter-impulse to the outward-directed brutality of men. In this poem, which came after one of those fevered nights, Cape Codâs long history of whaling serves as the backdrop connecting these opposing archetypes. I was thinking about how whalers would voyage out to sea, hunting whales with their harpoons and deconstructing the bodies for their parts, which had many uses. One of the uses for the baleen was in âwhaleboneâ corsets â a common form of self-mutilation by/for women. The voice in …
Carol Light: “Postcards from Ponza, The Prison Island”
To celebrate the passage of the winter solstice, we asked poet Carol Light to brighten our days with postcards from sunny places. Here’s what she she sent us, from a hotspot off the Italian coast… “Ponza is one of the islands of the Italian Pontine archipelago, near Cape Circeo, in the Tyrrhenian Sea. The island may have been the haunt of Homer’s infamous sorceress, Circe. Inhabited since Etruscan times, the island served as a place of exile for Romans plotting against emperors, as a penal colony, and as a dazzling vacation spot for celebrities, including Gina Lollobrigida. While visiting Ponza, I became fascinated by the idea of prisons, especially the idiosyncratic prison that contains the self, no matter where one is lucky enough to be. The poem began as a series of postcards written in blank verse.” Postcards from Ponza, the Prison Island 1. My panoramic lens apprehends a hammock slung between two lemon trees. Beyond the terracotta potted palms, grapes cluster, plump slubs twisting through the vineyardâs unwound skeins. Damp towels flap in …
Karl Kirchwey: Two Translations from Giovanni Giudici
Itâs nostalgia for the future that exhausts me.
Susan Stewart Memory and Imagination: Three Poems
Editor’s note: Every few months, we’ll take a tour of the archives, highlighting poems and writers from Poetry Northwest‘s fifty-plus year history. The first in the series featured poet and essayist Albert Goldbarth. This, the second, spotlights early work by the poet and critic Susan Stewart. David Wagoner, editor of Poetry Northwest for some 35 years, was well-known for publishing new and younger writers beside those more establishedâa tradition editor Kevin Craft has carried forward. For Mr. Wagoner, one of those young writers was Susan Stewart, whose work when it appeared in the magazine had an immediate impact, winning several prizes awarded by the magazine at the time. Here are three of those poems as they originally appeared in Poetry Northwest, with the poetâs own reflection on what these pieces mean to her now. — My first response to these lyrics is a feeling of deep retrospective gratitude to David Wagoner for publishing them and sending encouragement. Although I had admired his poems and had been reading Poetry Northwest since my college years, David Wagoner …